Branding & Graphic Design: The Creative Process

“Everything begins with an idea.” This quote by Earl Nightingale, an American speaker and an author known for being the Dean of Personal Development, relays the truth about how anything comes to materialise. From conception to maturity, everything develops until it evolves into its final product.

In the realm of Business Marketing—especially in Branding and Graphics Design—ideas that are conceptualised are first captured in various drafts, finalised through meetings, and then are actualised through abstract or concrete designs in the form of a Logo, a Banner, a Text, a Photo and many more.

Many people would pay for the best Graphic Designer to help create visual images for their brand because they know the value and the advantage that comes with having memorable images that customers can associate their brands to. From the use of colours to the types of font styles used and the shapes depicted, all these leave an impression on people and therefore it is necessary to have everything in harmony and aligned with your brand.

Branding and Graphics Design

“Branding is the marketing practice of creating a name, a symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.” – Entrepreneur Encyclopaedia

Branding isn’t just having a logo or a banner. It is everything from the intangible aspect of your business—like the foundation of your company, your vision-mission and more—to the tangible elements like holding a finished product to having a printed copy of your logo or your banner. Branding is the culmination of who your business is and what your company does. It is the soul from which your business derives its character from—and the character from which your business is defined and identified.

To help in Digital Marketing, your branding should be plastered everywhere. From your logo, websites, promotional materials and up to your products and services, all should visually and metaphorically reflect and symbolise your brand. You can do this by adding a tagline not only on your logo but also on your website other promotional materials. Creating a design template for your marketing posts or advertisements is also a sure way to leave an impression on your customers since they’ll be reminded of your brand whenever they see your curated design templates.

“Graphics Design, also known as communication design, is the art and practice of planning and projecting ideas and experiences with visual and textual content. The form it takes can be physical or virtual and can include images, words, or graphics.” – The Professional Association for Design 

Through Graphic Design, a company’s brand—their history, character, goals and more—is actualised in the form of visual images. Whether as a digital copy or a physical one, Graphic Artists can use images, words or graphics to depict a design that shall reflect the brand of the business. Through meticulous research and planning, artists can create many versions of a design in various scales and using different materials, font styles, colour combination and more.

In Internet Marketing, Graphics Design is an integral part of planning a marketing strategy since the look and feel of the promotional material of a business would depend on the design of what they would give out to people. And since everything that you release to the public should have a footprint of where it came from—so that your audience can interact with you,—having an image or a design that can identify you and connect you to your audience is one of the basic but also one of the most essential strategies to effective marketing.

The Creative Process

Research and Inspiration are the keys to creating great design. Just like any other venture, planning is the first step to creating a design. Planning may be in the form of talking to the person who wants the design or researching about whom the design is for and where it shall be used. Finding inspiration from your research is then essential to sketch out designs and start on drafts.

When talking about Graphic Design for the sake of business, especially in terms of Online Marketing; creating a logo and a website design that is aligned with the brand of the business are usually the ones that artists do. Whether they are making a new logo out of nothing or redesigning an existing one with improvements, all still starts with doing research. Input from the client as well as all research about the current trends in the target market, as well as their competitors are all necessary; for it is then through these that the designer can find inspiration and get ideas as to what kind of logo or website design is needed.

Based on research, the designer shall then turn to the Colour Palette and the Typography to bring colour and style to the drafts and sketches. The designer can take inspiration from previous images or create his own tone that shall be used to bring life to the drafted image. Especially in Digital Marketing, choosing the perfect colour or the right font style and font size are essential since studies have proven that each colour or font style and size appeal differently on the market. And since people tend to associate colour with certain emotions, using particular colours to invoke action from the user is powerful.

Matching the style of the text to the depicted image or the graphics is also important since having harmony in the design and the logo creates order that people tend to recognise and remember. With the colour, the style and the images working together to create a design that is reflective of the brand of the business, using the logo or the designs for digital marketing can surely attract people and leave impressions on potential clients.

Our Design Promise

The foundation of your brand is your logo. It is in this 400×400 standard maximum size that a business first leaves an impression on its audience. The colours and styles used to depict shapes and letters must all work together to create a logo that reflects the brand and represent the business. Along with a logo, your website and your promotional materials should also reflect the brand of your business. Be it by using the colours from your logo or the font style used to write your company name, every aspect of your design should agree and reflect your brand.

At Bureauserv, we get to know the business and its audience and then take inspiration from various market trends and competitions in order to conceive our own design that shall help the business stand out from the rest by depicting an image that reflects who they are and what they do. An illustration of how Branding and Graphics Design work hand-in hand in Business Marketing is seen in this particular example of creating a logo for a business called A Life Worth Living, Personal and Professional Coaching.

What started out as a sketch—given by the client to Bureauserv—transformed into a logo that can compete with all the other brands in its specific industry. From paper and pencil, we were able to incorporate what the client specifically wanted in terms of how the Willy Wagtail bird should look like, its colours, the size, and its placement in the logo with the actual text. From something black and white, we were able to actualise what the client wanted and used this logo as our starting point in creating other brand materials for the business like its website and social media pages.

With good Branding and Graphic Design, a business can grow from Digital Marketing especially when they are able to recognise how Branding and Graphics Design work hand-in-hand to create a lasting impression on the clients. By having logos, website and other promotional materials reflect the image or the brand of a company; the audience can familiarise themselves and connect these images to who the business is, what they do and how they serve their customers.